The Clone Ranger: Episode 7
Jack Unit 382 is a clone — one of a thousand identical Jacks laboring in the textile mills of Raven 5, a world his kind can never leave. Each night he journals the days since the treaty. But 382 has begun to suspect he is different from his brothers: he dreams, he wonders, and he wants things no Jack is supposed to want. This is his story. Journal Entry 691 Seven days. It has been seven days since I sat beneath the magnolia tree and told Black Bird ZX98 I would ask 583 to teach me to sketch, and tonight I am writing with charcoal dust under my fingernails. It will not wash out. I have tried three times. Part of me does not want it to. I did not ask him the next day. I waited three days, because asking felt like stepping off a ledge. On the fourth morning, I found 583 on his break, drawing the mill's great door on the back of a thread-crate slip, and I said it before my courage could leave me. "Teach me." He went very still. Then he laughed — not a mocking laugh, bu...